Review: A Love Song for Ricki Wilde

A Love Song for Ricki Wilde, by Tia Williams (Grand Central Publishing 2024)

First line: “Leap years are strange.”

I knew I wanted to read this before I even read a synopsis. Seven Days in June was my favorite book of 2021, so it didn’t matter what this next book was about. I would read it.

As it turns out, Love Song is a departure from Seven Days, and unlike Seven Days, which had me hooked within the first paragraph (can we all please take a moment to remember how epic that first paragraph was?), it took me a little while to get into it.

At the beginning of this story, we find Ricki, baby of the family by many years, sitting down with the Wildes for their weekly dinner. Richard Wilde, Sr., is the founder of a very successful funeral home conglomerate, and each of Ricki’s older sisters have their own booming franchise. But Ricki is floundering, serving as a receptionist at one of her father’s businesses, and dreaming of a day when she can open the business of her heart — an exotic floral shop. A chance meeting with a nonagenarian who has a flat for rent in Harlem, sends Ricki into her destiny, a road that will eventually lead her to a man named Ezra. A man who has been searching for her for decades, but only during Februarys of leap years.

I had a hard time at first because the Wildes are all wickedly horrible. But once Ricki gets to Harlem, the story picks up considerably and I was all in. Ricki as a character is full of life and spunk and heart, and she sees that reflected in the people who become her family in Harlem: Tuesday, a former child actor who becomes her bff, Ms. Della who becomes her grandmother, and Ezra, who becomes the love of her life. As with Seven Days, there are some tough topics covered here, with mental health, grief, guilt, and racism being at the forefront. But most of this story is just deliciously fun. We have Harlem Renaissance pianists and gorgeous, aromatic florals just spilling from the page, and I ate it all up.

The romance in this story is built on tropes I usually don’t go for — fated lovers, insta-love — but the magical realism elements made it work for me. Plus, Ricki and Ezra are just such likeable characters that it didn’t seem to matter. I have never read a story based around the strangeness of Leap Years (like, how did she even plan for the publication of this book so perfectly?), but I was so delighted to be reading it during one.

Happy Leap Day, everyone!

Review: Stories from the Tenants Downstairs

Stories from the Tenants Downstairs, by Sidik Fofana (narrated by a full cast) (Simon & Schuster Audio 2022)

First line: “Days left: 10… money you got: $0… money you need: $350.”

In this collection of interconnected short stories, debut author Sidik Fofana dives into the lives of various residents of a certain Harlem highrise. In the 50 pages or less (often much less) that Fofana devotes to each character, he transforms them from the stereotype these characters might project, or more likely is assumed to be from the onlooker — such as “the criminal”, “the Welfare Queen”, “the lazy student”, “the bum” — and paints a portrait of a person you can’t help but empathize with. He points out hypocrisy, offers nuance, and highlights gray areas in places society often does not permit. The audio narration features a full cast, with each narrator voicing a chapter (including Fofana himself, and my fave narrator Bahni Turpin), and is excellently done. It’s a short listen, so if you’re looking for another book to complete in 2022, this would be easy to put in your ears during a hefty wrapping session — although, it’s not going to necessarily put you in a jolly mood! Perhaps a good balance for the more fluffy holiday rom-coms so many of us enjoy during this season.

Introducing the Documentary Novel

No Crystal Stair: A Documentary Novel of the Life and Work of Lewis Michaux, Harlem Bookseller, by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson (2012)

Opening line: “Everybody keeps saying be satisfied with Jesus’s love, and he will give us our daily bread. I keep waiting, but we never get any bread, so I have to go out and do things for myself.”

I’ve been immersed in the realm of non-fiction lately, trying to find extended informational texts for our ELA teachers to use in their classes (since, according to CCSS, students should be reading 2 extended informational texts per year at the middle school level — yikes). This has led to all sorts of confusing conversations about what qualifies as informational, what qualifies as extended, etc. And this new “genre” introduced by Nelson only muddles the conversation even further.

What a peculiar book. As the subtitle states, it chronicles the life and work of Lewis Michaux, evidently an incredibly influential Harlem bookseller in the 1940s-70s. Has anyone heard of this guy before now? His bookshop was the gathering place for famous poets, writers, activists, and leaders, most notably, Malcolm X. Not only did he house the great leaders of the civil rights movement, but he was an outspoken voice himself, loudly displaying controversial signs in his windows, shouting as he pulled book carts down the sidewalks, always advocating for African Americans to educate themselves with materials written by them, for them, and about them. He believed in his store and what he was selling, calling it “The House of Common Sense and the Home of Proper Propaganda.” Because according to Michaux, “Knowledge is the thing that is needed among young people today. You can’t protect yourself if you don’t know something.”

So not only was this content new and exhilarating, but the format too was something different than I’ve ever read before. Nelson (or her publishers, as the case may be) describes it as a “documentary novel,” which means it’s a blend of various character voices in little paragraph or page-long snippets and media (photographs, newspaper clippings, FBI reports, etc.) to create a picture of a historical figure. The actual voices are created from the author’s imagination, but the characters and clippings are almost all true and historical. So does this qualify as an “extended informational text”? It’s conventions (photos/images/graphs with captions, index, references, bibliographies, etc.) would suggest so. But it’s structure is one very much of a storytelling narrative, so I think all in all, no. Does that mean it does not share information with readers? ABSOLUTELY NOT! I learned all kinds of information I didn’t know before by reading Nelson’s book. It’s definitely informational, regardless of Common Core’s definitions.

Although I learned a ton and powered through this in less than 24 hours, the content is a bit dry for teen readers. I have a feeling it would take quite a motivated reader to pick up this selection and read it in its entirety. A powerful story, and one told in a new and inventive way, but not quite as engaging as I had hoped.

1.5 stars